Tuesday, March 4, 2025
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2025
Amy Dunn is dead.
Three years old, unloved, and dead. That doesnʼt seem reasonable or even possible. She could read simple words and count to thirty. I taught her. She so much loved getting attention that she stuck to me during school hours and drove me crazy. Didnʼt want me to go to the bathroom without her.
Dead.
I had gotten to like her, even though she was a pest.
Today I walked her home after class. I had gotten into the habit of walking her home because the Dunns wouldnʼt send anyone for her.
“She knows the way,” Christmas said. “Just send her over. Sheʼll get here all right.”
I didnʼt doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges—one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amyʼs scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald.
I took her to her door and left her in the care of her mother.
“You didnʼt have to get her so wet,” Tracy complained.
“Might as well enjoy the rain while it lasts,” I said, and I left them.
I saw Tracy take Amy into the house and shut the door. Yet somehow Amy wound up outside again, wound up near the front gate, just opposite the Garfield/Balter/Dory house. Jay Garfield found her there when he came out to investigate what he thought was another bundle that someone had thrown over the gate. People toss us things sometimes—gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us.
Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate. It had to be an accidental hit because you canʼt see through our gate from the outside. The shooter either fired at someone who was in front of the gate or fired at the gate itself, at the neighborhood, at us and our supposed wealth and privilege. Most bullets wouldnʼt have gotten through the gate. Itʼs supposed to be bulletproof. But itʼs been penetrated a couple of times before, high up, near the top. Now we have six new bullet holes in the lower portion—six holes and a seventh dent, a long, smooth gauge where a bullet had glanced off without breaking through.
We hear so much gunfire, day and night, single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasional blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs. We worry most about those last things, but theyʼre rare. Itʼs harder to steal big weapons, and not many people around here can afford to buy the illegal ones—or thatʼs what Dad says. The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we donʼt hear it. A couple of the Baiter kids said they heard shooting, but as usual, they paid no attention to it. It was outside, beyond the wall, after all. Most of us heard nothing except the rain.
Amy was going to turn four in a couple of weeks. I had planned to give her a little party with my kindergartners.
God, I hate this place.
I mean, I love it. Itʼs home. These are my people. But I hate it. Itʼs like an island surrounded by sharks— except that sharks donʼt bother you unless you go in the water. But our land sharks are on their way in. Itʼs just a matter of how long it takes for them to get hungry enough.
From Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler